Advancing the Ability of Robots to Help

Ayanna howard, roboticist, ACM Athena Lecturer, and dean of The Ohio State University College of Engineering, is optimistic about the ability of robots to help people. She understands the challenges that must be addressed for that to happen, and has worked throughout her career not just to advance the technical state of the art, but to quantify and overcome issues including trust and bias in artificial intelligence (AI). Here, she talks about self-driving cars, accessible coding, and how to incorporate different perspectives into hardware and software design. The pandemic heightened public interest in robots--suddenly, we all want robot cleaners and robot grocery deliverers and so on. How is that impacting the robotics community?